From Christopher Dickey, the author of "Our Man in Charleston: Britain's Secret Agent in the Civil War South" and "Securing the City," this site provides updates and footnotes on history, espionage, terrorism, fanaticism, policing and counterinsurgency linked to Dickey's columns for The Daily Beast and his other writings; also, occasional dialogues, diatribes, and contributions from friends.

Sunday, October 09, 2005

Travel: Michael Allin's Alex

Michael Allin and I have been friends since long ago and far away when I was at the beginning of my teens and he was at the end of his. He went on to become a screenwriter ("Enter the Dragon") and novelist ("The Christmas Kid"), but found his real metier as a poet-traveler-historian with the book "Zarafa," about a giraffe given by the Pasha of Egypt to the King of France in the early 19th century. Michael retraced the journey of this wild animal with whom everyone seemed to fall in love as she made her way from Sudan up the Nile to Alexandria, across the Mediterranean to Marseilles, and was then walked through France to the Jardin des Plantes in Paris: history as fable, travel as literature. Michael has since wandered along the remotest recesses of the Silk Road, is now exploring South America, and occasionally shares his writing with us on his blog: "Leaving Africa, from my book ZARAFA:

"At Alexandria the sea is ever changing -- turquoise shallows and purple depths and vast outer blue that turns dark green when the wind roughens it too choppy to reflect the sky, silver gray under clouds and patched with golden columns of sunlight -- constant only in its immensity and, after the snaking current of the Nile, violently alive. Incoming swells explode into rainbows against the limestone fortress of the Mamelukes at the entrance to the harbor. The light, too, is mercurial, moody without the solid heat of the desert. Arabic sounds different here, and faces change as Egypt turns Greek."After the overwhelming fact of the Nile -- where the heat and the landscape and fifty centuries of history confirm the irrelevance of any particular life -- Alexandria is a physical and emotional relief, a beautiful and confusing letdown. Body and eyes no longer suffer, and the mind no longer searches in awe for the shelter of a detail -- momentary shade, a drink, some small living touch like the green monkey climbing that other Zarafa's neck [painted in a tomb at Luxor] 3,500 years ago. ..."

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About Me

Award-winning author Christopher Dickey is Foreign Editor of The Daily Beast. His latest book, Our Man in Charleston: Britain's Secret Agent in the Civil War South, was a New York Times bestseller in 2015. Chris's other nonfiction books include Securing the City, a New York Times Book Review notable book in 2009; Summer of
Deliverance, his memoir about his father, poet and novelist James
Dickey; Expats, about Westerners in the modern Muslim world;
and With the Contras, a first-hand account of combat in Central
American wars. He is also the author of two acclaimed thrillers: Innocent Blood and The Sleeper. Chris
worked for The Washington Post in Central America and the Middle East before serving with Newsweek in Cairo and Paris. His columns about dictators, dissidents and terrorists appear on The Daily Beast. Links are posted on The Shadowland Journal.